Nice job with the assumptions, but I actually live in Iceland (probably one of the least prudish countries on the planet), not the US, so try again.

It depends on how you measure it. For example, here it says that solar is rapidly nearing cost parity except in places where restrictions and fees on net metering are in replace. But it's only fair that there should be such fees.

Part of the reason for this battle in the US is the stupid way US consumers are billed, you usually pay a single per-kWh fee. Here in Iceland our electricity bills are broken down into a "distribution fee", for the infrastructure, and a "generation fee", for the power. Surprise surprise, all of that infrastructure costs some serious money, about as much as the cost of generation itself. If a person uses solar and net-meters out at zero, they're still using all of that infrastructure (unless they're off-grid, but nobody's arguing that off-grid is anywhere near price parity). Even more than that you're relying on the existence and functionality of power plants to keep the lights on during the day. If everyone did like you, then there'd have to be instead of power plants massive daytime-energy-storage buffers, be they batteries, pumped hydro, etc (in addition to all of the wires, transformers, etc).

Now if you don't have to pay the utility, who exactly is supposed to fund this stuff? It's not cheap.

Yes, many US states require free net metering and power resale. It's the law, so utilities have to do it. But all you're doing at the time being is transferring the solar-generators' share of the infrastructure costs onto the non-solar-generators share. So when you report that these people can "break even", is that really a fair comparison?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big solar fan. And I think that to reach true parity subsidies - such as these free net metering laws - are a great way to help get solar to that point. But let's not kid ourselves, it is a subsidy.

(Things would be a lot less controversial if you'd properly break up your power bills into distribution vs. generation costs. Personally I think bills should be even further broken down to time intervals over the course of the day and have the purchase / sale price of electricity match the actual market price for that time. It'd be a big boon for solar users, at least in warm places with low to moderate market penetration where midday electricity is expensive and nighttime electricity is cheap)

Actually, the statistics are precisely opposite. The lower the turbine and the higher the RPM, the more birds it kills, while the higher the turbine and the lower the RPM (aka, the wider the blade radius), the fewer birds it kills. Also, tower design plays a major role. Those truss-style towers popular with small-scale turbines are the worst, as birds see them as potential perches / roosts.

The worst wind farm in the US for bird deaths by far is Altamont Pass, especially their older turbines, which look like this. They're pretty much a bird cuisinart, they kill thousands of raptors every year and have had a significant impact on California's bird of prey population, while most wind farms have an irrelevant impact on bird populations.

Now that's just unfair. Long term storage costs for nuclear "waste" only exist because the government doesn't allow for the reprocessing of perfectly good fuel. If they did, we'd be more like France, where the total final long-term waste of a family of four's entire lifetime fits in a soda can. And as all the usable energy has been removed from it, it actually is waste, meaning there's no energy radiating from it and no danger from it. At which point, those costs look vastly easier to manage and all subsidies can come off with virtually no impact to costs.

Government created a problem (basically a tax) by disallowing the reuse of perfectly good fuel. It then partially solved the problem it created by generating a subsidy to offset the tax. In the meantime, good fuel is wasted, exposed, and dangerous. It's about the dumbest thing in the world, but then again, it was something our government came up with, so at least that makes some sense.

There is a such thing as people who want to be killed and eaten by cannibals, but that doesn't mean that the general case of people being killed and cannibalized is a happy relation of choice. No, most people in the sex industry do not want to be there. This is shown time and time again in international studies. Why the heck do you think sex trafficking exists?

The concept of a sex industry packed full of people who secretly lust after pleasing you is just part of the image people profitting from the industry want to sell customers on. It's marketing, not reality. Sex workers by choice absolutely do exist, but they're a very small minority. Most are there because of desperation, and a disturbing number in some places are not there of choice (a very common tactic is tricking people from poorer countries to travel to wealthier countries with promises of regular work, only to have them find out after they arrive that the work available to them is sex work and they have no means to get back to their home country nor any form of support network in a country they know nothing about).

Oh, no, I'm totally sure that the "particular and very specific claim about her personal life" that they wanted to dox her on has absolutely nothing to do with her sex life. Surely not. It's probably about what brand of coffee she drinks or something.

But it seems some "feminist" think that any job where women are in sex service means women are object or something

Right, I mean, in what way could having people oggle your body like a piece of meat or choose which person to buy from a catalog be interpreted as objectification? Pish, stupid feminists!

to sell their body on their own, and *exploit* the men for all their money worth

Sure, because that's totally the general case, right? Sorry, but as someone who's known several people who've worked in the sex industry, and is currently watching a friend struggle with choosing between starving or have his daughter have a "whore" (his words) as a father (he's straight, in case it matters... not like it actually does), this "prostitution is an empowering industry of choice" meme rings really f*ing hollow to me.

(to head you off, yes, I have been trying to help him, and am probably the only reason that he hasn't had to resort to it so far)

Right, because there's nobody more oppressed and powerless in the US, more incapable of handling PR, than corporations, right?

Those evil journalists! We should just assassinate them all with polonium! Especially ones that mention that they find a company working with an escort service to be sexist!

I don't care if she wrote that she feels Uber is in league with Satan , Doxxing Journalists Is Never Acceptable. And the reason for the focus on her in particular is because, and I quote, "In particular, Michael wished to target Pando founder Sarah Lacy after her publication’s repeated attacks against Uber." It says that right there in TFA. And in the article linked by the TFA, wherein Emil apparently went on at length about his rage against Sarah.

Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.

At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column and said that women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers. He said that he thought Lacy should be held “personally responsible” for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted.

Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.

It's such a F'ing gamergate attitude. Female journalist finds something you do sexist? Reveal details of her personal life - that'll teach the f*ing c*** to shut up, right?

Only very high pressure hydrogen stations can pull off such rapid fills, more common lower pressure stations can take several times longer.

And as much as I don't want a large tank of an extremely combustible gas (yes, it's far, far more combustible than gasoline, see above), near me, I really don't want the same amount of hydrogen at extreme pressures.

And it's so pointless. The hydrogen fuel cycle is so wasteful that it defeats its purpose right off the bat.

SOFCs are neat, but they have long warmup times and are bulky. They're efficient in continuous operation but wasteful in short operation. They're not really ideally suited to vehicles.

And make the process even less efficient? The hydrogen fuel cycle is as-is about 1/3rd as efficient as simply using electricity to power BEVs directly - and that's with efficient industrial H2 electrolysis. Trying to scale down dand "localize" H2 just makes it even worse.

And honestly, given how much hydrogen - completely unlike gasoline - likes to detonate rather than just burn, no, I'm not too fond of large numbers of potential points of failure. Yes, gasoline burns with a tremendous amount of energy. So does hydrogen. Except that the hydrogen does so in a small fraction of a percent as much time.

Gasoline does not explode (detonate) under STP conditions, no matter what the concentration, distribution, environment geometry, you name it. It simply doesn't. In ideal situations you can get a rapid conflagration, but even that requires very specific, often hard to achieve conditions. What you linked is a page about car fires, not explosions. Simply burning the gasoline, over a period of minutes.

Hydrogen does explode (detonate) under STP conditions, given a proper environment for a DTD transition. It does burn rapidly in almost any fuel-air mixture. It ignites with a spark of only around a tenth as much energy as gasoline - even trivial static sparks and discharges from common household electronics are enough to ignite it. Liquid hydrogen is even worse - for example, if air gets accidentally entrained in liquid hydrogen, it freezes out and can detonate with properties similar to high explosives.

Both gasoline and hydrogen pool in the right condition - but while gasoline pools on the floor, especially in low points, hydrogen pools in ceilings, especially overhangs. Hydrogen does tend to dissipate faster (although this is countered by its wider combustion range). Two additional problems occur with hydrogen. One, it embrittles metals very easily, both from rapid leaks and from slow leaks. Two, when it pools, it tends to seep into pipes and then follow them to their destinations; there have been cases where a hydrogen leak in one builing has caused an explosion in a completely different building (which is why whenever pipes are in a series and one contains hydrogen, it's always supposed to be the highest up).

There are plenty of chemicals more dangerous than hydrogen, no question. But the simple matter is, hydrogen is far more combustible than gasoline. It's just a basic fact. Which is obvious just by looking at, say, NASA's hydrogen handling guidelines. I mean, any building that handles more than 10kg is supposed to have a roof that's designed to be blown off in an explosion.

On the upside, hydrogen is nontoxic, unlike gasoline! Surface environmental consequences of leaks are minimum to none, although it does destroy high-altitude ozone, at a rate that would be a serious concern if hydrogen became a common fuel given typical leakage rates.

You could, if it's rotating around you at 30 or 60 or however many frames per second you want your film in. Of course, you can't just save the raw data for that. If you wanted literal direct camera data for all points and if we say a person can perceive a rotation of 0,1 degrees (it's probably a lot less than that) then a 30fps movie filmed by a rotating camera would actually have to film at 108k FPS (and a 60FPS movie at 216k FPS) to capture the view at each perceiptible point along its travel. Clearly that's an unreasonable amount of data. But as per above, you could use the stability and precisely known positions of the camera between frames to assist in quick mutual-point registration to get a measure of parallax and thus z-depth across your footage as the camera rotates, and thus could texture a series of discontinous simple surfaces around the user. The required texture data wouldn't be that much larger than simple stitched 3d stills of the same quality, and the 3d geometry resolution could probably be half an order of magnitude less than the texture resolution and still look right. And because you no longer need to film at each point the user can perceive, just enough to build up your textured geometry, you could probably film at more like a couple hundred frames per second. Or use a dozen or so stationary sensors cameras positioned around a head-sized sphere.

Specifically two cameras? Why? If you're picturing simple stereoscopy, that doesn't work if the viewer can turn their head.

If we're talking turning the head on just one axis, I picture something along the lines of a single camera sweeping in a horizontal circle at 60rpm (or two cameras at 30rpm, 3 at 20 rpm, etc, or any equivalent non-rotating setup using many sensors). The rotation (or virtual rotation) would be around an offset axis, where the center of rotation is the center of rotation of a human neck and the distance to the focal point is the distance to the focal point of a human eye. This would of course be a tremendous data stream, but you wouldn't actually be saving all of that. Instead you'd be building up a z-buffer based on the parallax or another ranging method and using that to create and texture simple discontinous 3d surfaces around the user.

Displaying the resulant movie would be not quite as simple as mere billboarding, but a lot easier than full 3d (no lighting / shadowing calculations, very simple obstruction culling, etc). That the surfaces would be discontunous isn't a problem - unless the goal would be to let people walk around freely, you don't need to know what's behind the gaps that the camera can't see. You could potentially even use data from earlier frames to remove the cameraman - the cameraman would just need to be sure to stand in areas where nothing has changed (even shadows / reflections / indirect lighting / etc, to the extent that's possible).

If you want full 2-axis VR, not just one axis, I don't think actual physically rotating cameras would work, I'd expect you'd have no option but to use many sensors on the outside of a sphere roughly the size of a human head.